Friday, November 18, 2011

Changes Abound

I know it's a bit of a cliché, but it's also pretty much true: You never really know what life is going to throw at you. All you can do is hold on for the ride and hope to get some fun out of it in the end.

A year ago, my husband and I were ramping up for the holiday season. He would need to be working insane retail hours, and I would need to be investing unhealthy amounts of time gazing at shopping sites and deciphering the maze of downtowners as they hustled through the department stores. Not that I really enjoy shopping, mind you, but there's a certain allure to watching the madness of it all.

This year is a bit different. This year we're hankering down and learning to enjoy the quieter, family-focused side of life while celebrating the end of old things that Winter has been known to represent.

My husband isn't working retail anymore, so gone are the days of never knowing when we would get to see each other for the next six weeks. In fact, that's one of the ends we're celebrating. He's starting back at school in January and he's going to be working toward a brighter future for us while doing work that he wants to do.

As for me, I'm celebrating another kind of end. I'm leaving the company that I've spent the past five years working for and moving toward the career that I've really wanted since college. I'm currently working in logistics for a large food service company. It's a very corporate environment with the typical corporate trappings: politics, red-tape, HR. It's been great work, and I've met some amazing and intelligent people, but it's really my time to move on.

My new company is quite a different direction. It's a marketing research firm that focuses on social media. They have a very progressive concept of employee relations and they are still a very young company with a strong sense of "start-up" still built in to their core. But most importantly, I'll finally be able to start working in the field I fell in love with back in 2003 when I took my first marketing research and consumer psychology course.

It's scary. Our lives are full of changes right now. New jobs, new careers, new schools, new lifestyles… Lots and lots of new. It can be difficult to say goodbye to the things we know and are comfortable with, and that's what we're working through right now.

I always had a vision of the 30-year old me (well, when I got to an age where I could conceive of myself being that old) that was put together, calm, and settled into his life. I just knew that the "adult" me would be the bastion of security and boring repetition. I'm learning now that things will always be changing, and I'm becoming OK with that.

I can't always plan for changes and I can't always be prepared when they come, but what I know I can do is learn to accept them as they happen and realize that, with just a little work and effort, things will turn out alright.